Steve Jobs’ daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, was mentored by the mother of YouTube’s CEO

Esther Wojcicki, a
journalism teacher at Palo Alto High School, was a mentor to Lisa
Brennan-Jobs, the daughter of Apple cofounder Steve
Jobs.

Joi
Ito

• The new biography from Lisa Brennan-Jobs, the daughter
  of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, illustrates just how closely
  knit Silicon Valley can be. 
• Brennan-Jobs’ high school mentor was Esther Wojcicki,
  the mother of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and 23andMe CEO Anne
  Wojcicki.
• Esther Wojcicki is a longtime and well-respected
  educator.

The San Francisco Bay Area as a whole may be a huge metropolitan
region, but Silicon Valley can often seem like a small town.

“Small Fry,” the new biography by Lisa Brennan-Jobs,
illustrates that point.

Brennan-Jobs is the daughter of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. After
spending her early years with her mother, artist Chrisann
Brennan, Brennan-Jobs went to live with her famous father as a
teenager.

While in high school, Brennan-Jobs got into journalism and became
the editor-in-chief of her school’s newspaper. Her journalism
teacher, who was also her mentor, was Esther
Wojcicki.

If that last name sounds familiar, it’s because it should. That’s
because she’s the mother of Susan and Anne Wojcicki.

Susan Wojcicki, of course, is the CEO of YouTube, and it was in
her garage that Larry Page and Sergey Brin first got Google up
and running. Anne Wojcicki is the CEO of genomics company
23andMe, and was once married to Brin.

To be sure, Esther Wojcicki is notable in her own right. She’s a
well-respected educator who has taught journalism at Palo Alto
High School for more than two decades and founded the school’s
Media Arts Center.

In an
interview with The New York Times, Wojcicki praised her
former student’s new book.

“The dialogue that she had in there between her and Steve was
just exactly right,” Wojcicki said. “The book is a gift to all of
us.”

The photo of Esther Wojcicki is used under a Creative Commons
license.

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